4.8.2022


OPX and their goal

  • Develop solutions for socially responsible investment strategies
  • Increase cash flow to charitable purposes


How to assess financial performance?

  • Data collection
  • Key Performance Indicators


Phase 1 – how to harvest and analyze the data?

  • A webcrawler that could collect data across different websites?
    This would be too difficult and it would only work with some organizations
  • A code that could read PDF?


Phase 2 – Exploring three options

  • Financial statements in yearly reports published as PDF
    Issue: Financial statements are not always published as text
  • Webscraping financial statements from Proff.no
    Issue: Proff.no does not allow webscraping!
  • Webscraping the Brønnøysund registry
    Issue: The registry does offer API access, but access costs about 500k kr


Workarounds…

  • Proff.no: It maaay be legal to manually download the websites as HTML instead of scraping
  • Brønnøysund: We attempted to request a temporary access to XML documents


… and why they did not work

  • Different accounting divisions at Proff.no and Brønnøysund prohibited extracting the correct sums OPX wanted
  • Not all NGOs publish their financial statements and certainly not for every year
  • Which led us to Phase 3 - scrapping the scraping

Data collection

Data description

Findings

Limitations and steps forward


Our experience

  • Unsolvable case due to non-existent data
  • Hard to create credible KPIs due to limited knowledge of economics and the NGO sector
  • Insight into real-life work challenges - the clash between what is desired and what is possible